Wireless Sensor Network Design for Wire Harness Testing System

The wire harness testing system by Fujian Creation Electronics Co., Ltd (FCE) burdens high system installation costs. FCE introduced IEEE 802.15.4 module to develop a wireless sensor network (WSN). However, the WSN designed by FCE contains numerous sensors and each of them needs to upload mass data to the server. This lengthens the time for data collection1, and hence the detection result refresh time becomes too long to be accepted by their customers. Therefore, a solution for the time constraint from the customers of FCE is a challenge to overcome. Thus, we designed an appropriate WSN without the time constraints for the wireless wire harness testing system of FCE by introducing the edge computing methodology to transfer the mass data into a small one. Based on this method, we proposed necessary network protocols and algorithms for the wireless wire harness testing system. The wireless solution proposed in this study significantly reduces labor costs and improves operational efficiency.

I. Introduction

The installation cost for the wire harness testing system of the FCE is high. The existing system adopts a real-time Ethernet/IP network to communicate with sensors and the server. The customers of the FCE desire to replace the existing sensors with wireless sensors to reduce installation costs. The engineers of the FCE attempted to employ commercial wireless sensor network solutions such as IEEE 802.15.4, but the prototypes cannot overcome the time constraint since the density of the sensors is too high to upload mass data to the server. There have been many attempts for solving this problem [1] but with complex network topology. The sensor network considered in this study contains only one cluster. Although the network topology is simple, the amount of data that all sensors in a cluster need to upload to the cluster head in a unit of time exceeds the maximum bit rate of the 802.15.4 communication module.